Game Mechanics Remove Soul Points (v2)

yeeeeeeees

 

I completely agree with this idea soul points are useless, I would much rather have 2-5eb be removed from my bank then 2 soul points and all my items.

 

Anti-Soul point pilled bump

 

Maybe instead of removing soul points entirely they can just be reworked into having a different purpose entirely?

Something like the higher your Soul Points are, you get some buffs like more XP, higher loot/drop rate chances, and instead of SP going down when dying, they deplete over time and only regenerate while offline. (Maybe 1 an hour)

That way Soul Point Bombs would still serve a purpose

 

If soul points deplete while you’re online , then that doesn’t solve the problems that current sp have. New (and returning) players would just quit for a while once their sp gets down far enough, which reduces playtime. Only this time,whether players are being careful(by not dying) or not, their sp deplete.

 

...I'm sorry, what?

I haven't checked this thread for... a while, and now that my English has actually improved to the point of being able to write and read naturally, I reread some of the arguments here, and I lost a significant bit of faith in this community.
First off, seven per cent of people want Soul Points to stay. This is absolutely insane and I know it has been written about thoroughly, but essentially, Soul Points disincentivize playing. They're ANTI-PLAYER! After you work to get better at a boss by failing a couple of times (as is natural and should be expected - what the hell would people do if Soul Points were introduced to, say, Elden Ring* ?), the game actively denies you the ability to play any more, which is a bad idea if you want people to play your game (this should be obvious).
Luckily, that is only seven per cent of the people who responded to the poll (with a couple notable names... I'm not going to call out specific people here, but there were people whose opinions I trusted and now do not).

That, however, isn't my main issue.
My main issue is with the near 50 per cent of the playerbase that seems to think that punishing the player for playing the game is a good idea.

You're just as bad as the SP fans, you know what? You criticize them for "preventing the game from being played" and "being detrimental to new players"; any punishment will do this! Any punishment drains resources from the player, effectively draining their time, and as such, is just as bad as Soul Points.
At least this one means that they actively have to be grinding to get back their resources, and not, you know, waiting for their SP to come back (it's not like there's anything else they could do in that time). That's right, punishments that remove resources might actually be worse than SP, because at least with SP you can be doing other things while waiting for them to come back, but with resource removal, you'd have to be grinding actively to get your resources back. Here's a novel idea: What if we just removed punishment entirely, so the game doesn't punish you for making mistakes?

Games that punish you for making mistakes are anti-growth. You're not supposed to try new things in the game, because, if you do, you might die, and that would be bad. Death punishments also mean that you get punished for getting better at bosses.
This is insane. The game should facilitate players getting better at bosses, not punish them for doing so.


*So, if you're a Pro-SP player (please respond to my comment in this case I need to actually hear some arguments for this side because I really can't think of a single one) a tempting argument might be "Ah, but this is an unfair comparison! Elden Ring is significantly harder than Wynncraft!"
This, of course, is true - Elden Ring is, on average, harder than Wynncraft. However, unless you're incredibly skilled at the game, you won't be able to get through without several tries of most bosses. Soul Points block this from happening.

 

Like a year ago I already said this

Spoiler: my opinion

Whilst I do believe that there needs to be a "penalty" for death, I think that teleporting to the nearest spawn location and losing some time going back is enough of a penalty. So I simply voted "yes" here.

The reason for death to be a mechanic is, in my eyes, to add difficulty to certain challenges and make sure that people have to get past those challenges before going to other challenges. Someone fights a mob (challenge) and loses, they have to re-do that challenge to get further than that challenge. (or, since wynn is open-word, find another way.)
A mechanic that makes someone lose items / gain debuffs from dying is counterintuitive in my eyes. They lost a challenge, so you give them a handicap meaning that next time the challenge will be more difficult.

I don't think people teleporting using /kill is an issue at all. In order to succesfully do this, they need to be close to wherever they want to teleport anyway. Also, doing /kill and ending up where you wanted to end up feels good. Might not be intended, but like rocket jumping in tf2, it's more fun than walking and as such does not need to be removed.
(Until walking through areas you already know inside-out is made more fun than teleporting through those same areas, that is.)

to which I want to add that there is one place where I think a death penalty is useful. Places you need to pay to enter specifically to "prove your skill for rewards". Think dungeons, raids, and legendary Island. But simply respawning and needing to pay the entry price again is enough of a setback IMO.

I would also like to add that in addition to the punishment of travel time and cost of entry, death also is a punishment by taking away potential reward from not dying and the instant immersion break upon respawning in a different location than where you were. All of which feel bad enough to act as a punishment.


But I'm mostly here to respond to this:

(like stated above, I am in no way pro-SP but because I enjoy thinking about game mechanics I do have decently well-thought out opinions on why they should be in the game.)

Spoiler: Reason 1 - It rewards planning

I really like your Elden Ring comparison. But such "Anti-player" mechanics can serve a purpose. So please indulge me by thinking about another game, which has very harsh anti-player death punishments but is still generally considered to be very good:

Darkest Dungeon

Spoiler: In case people reading this are not familiair with Darkest Dungeon

Upon starting the game each time you get a message stating that "Darkest Dungeon is about making the best of a bad situation". This should give you enough of an idea of the kind of tone the game has.

In darkest dungeon you do two things. You take care of a little town and you send (and command) groups of adventurers into dungeons. All in a very HP-lovecraft eldritch horror themed environment.
The town-aspect has you micromanage the resources you gain from your ventures into the dungeon, upgrading your adventurers, managing their stress, etc.
The dungeon-aspect has you commanding the adventurers, inventory-managing between loot and life-saving items, and, when you think it is needed, retreating. Which generally means you spend more resources going on that mission than not going on that mission.

Darkest dungeon has a lot of chance-related events. Things can and will go wrong. Sometimes a party of adventurers which took you over 10 hours to fully upgrade, with trinkets you can only hope to get back once in a blue moon will die due to circumstances barely in your control.

I will not spoil much further because it's honestly one of the best games I've ever played and it's best played blind (though I'd advise against the hardest difficult if going in blind.)
(Also, before finishing it I had to take a break from it a few times because the losses had such a mental impact on me. People have reported sleeping problems from the stress caused by that game. It is not for the faint of heart but there's no game out there as good at getting an emotional response out of me. Even if that emotion is the kind of despair described in HP Lovecraft's horrors)

In darkest dungeon, when people in your party die, you lose alot of progress you need to rebuild. As a result, whilst playing I have very meticulously prepared dungeons before going into them. Double and even triple-checking many things once I understood how the mechanics interacted with eachother. If whenever I died in a dungeon the game simply allowed me to restart it as if nothing happened, I would never have planned as hard or been so relieved when I finished.

Basically, because darkest dungeon is punishing, it rewards planning more and it feels better to win

Spoiler: Why I think wynn should not do this

As a game, however, wynn does not incentivise planning. Not that it cannot be done, you could spend alot of time crafting the perfect gear for each boss fight and each area knowing all the elemental resistances everywhere. But the game is not designed with this in mind. Wynn feels like it is designed for people to be able to explore in a much more relaxed way. The quests do not acknowledge it if you fail at a part of it and I don't see why your character should. In fact, it is cannonical that your character does not remember they die (see: Beyond The Grave Quest).

The parts that do actually actively want to challenge a player for a reward are behind a pay-wall such as a dungeon key. Having to repay that is punishment enough in my eyes.

Spoiler: Reason 2 - it removes tension from many (often combat) situations

Death is one of the few ways wynncraft uses to add tension to situations

In wynncraft death adds tension in four (up to five) ways:
- takes away any reward you would get from not dying
- feeling dreadful towards the act of getting back to the destination
- takes you out of immersion
- makes you lose items
- optional: having to repay the cost of entry for whereever you died

(Yes I do believe tension is created by thinking about possible negative emotions/scenarios.)

By removing the loss of items items death adds less tension and the game is therefore less emotionally rewarding.

Spoiler: Why it doesn't actually remove all that much tension from fights

You only start losing stuff once you have already died a couple of times in a row. Once you start losing only just a little bit the bigger annoyance still is having to walk all the way back. Once you start actually losing stuff you care about the objectively best thing to do is stop playing. It punishes too little for there to be added tension at the beginning and too much to want to continue playing later.

Basically once it actually starts adding tension it starts adding so much tension that it becomes unfun and actually dreadful to get in a situation where you might die.

Spoiler: Final reasons - it's already in the game / always has been in the game / Salted said they wanted a penalty for death

The first two are just bad reasons that can be used to essentially defend every game mechanic
The last reason just shows how important it is to convince Salted they shouldn't think that.

I don't see the appeal of any of these final reasons but it is the most common reason people want skill points.

 

Alright, here's a probably controversial opinion.
Walkbacks and entry costs are stupid.

Yep.
I'm hardcore anti-punishment.

Small walkbacks are fine. Dying in COW and having to walk back there from Troms is fine. However, walkbacks like that from the Bob fight are just long and unnecessary; I don't know who enjoys walking down a 300-block tunnel fifteen times. "Long walkbacks are annoying" isn't a controversial opinion (probably), though; my big controversial opinion is entry costs.

Time to tackle grinding as a whole!

So, entry costs. The concept of this is that, obviously, you have to expend some resource to get into a dungeon/LI. I understand why entry costs make sense for dungeons (see this comment I made for numbers on how much the Forgery gets you), because of the rewards they give, but it does make me a bit sad that I can't run dungeons over and over simply for their content - what I would give to be able to run CUR or FF (or, of course, the legendary CGG) indefinitely...
Raids also make sense, because they're another good money making method.
Legendary Island and Boss Altars, however, are different beasts entirely.

When I come home from a day of working (be it at school or a job), the last thing I will want to do is more menial labor. Wynncraft, however, doesn't seem to understand this.

Fighting a boss altar has two parts to it:
a) Getting the materials to fight the boss, and
b) Fighting the boss.
I'll let you take a guess as to which I enjoy more.
The fact that the fun aspect of the game (fighting a boss) is locked behind grinding (for the materials) is pretty stupid. I understand that "it gives a greater sense of reward" when you're put through the pain of grinding before the fun of the boss, but wouldn't it just be better if you didn't have to grind, and instead just got the fun side of things? Like I just said, after working for a day IRL, I don't want to have to work more in-game if I don't find it fun. The fun part of the game is fighting the bosses, and if the game won't let me do that without menial labor, I might just go play some other game.

Legendary Island has this even worse. Some of the hardest bosses in the game exist only behind this 10eb paywall. This might not seem like that much, but consider that you can only guarantee the Mummyboard fight for 10eb. If you fail, then, guess what, that's 10 more eb, and for most players, that starts to add up quickly (especially if you spent a significant amount of money on your build, as most players will have). This boss rush really just doesn't let you test out different builds against it; I can't try out Jump Height Grimpockets against Matrojan, because I'd most likely fail a dozen times before getting there, and I just don't have those funds.

 

Now there's a nice and hot take for which I think you made some good points

The main reason I like walkbacks is because they act as a time period during which the player can come to their senses and strategize on how to not die in the same situation the next time. I fully agree that the walking back times sometimes are too long (especially during quests outside of the main map that teleport you to some city on the main map). And I'd honestly be in favor of a suggestion along the lines of "add spawnpoints in front of boss doors" which it feels like you're suggesting as an alternative. It's less forceful than a walkback but it still allows people to sit and ponder.

Assuming that with "hardcore anti-punishment" you still mean that if someone dies to a boss (/ whatever), they still have to restart the boss fight and that you don't mean so hardcore anti-punishment that players instantly heal upon death or something. Similair to how when you fail at a parkour challenge you get teleported back to the start of parkour rather than the nearest city like what happens when you fail at a combat challenge (die), I think that we actully just about fully agree here. I just kinda took the fact that there are no spawn points near the place a person dies as a fact since the thread is just talking about removing soul points and not revamping deaths entirely.
I am against healing in the middle of a fight by dying though.

As for as entry costs go, the reason I want people to re-pay the entry costs is because cost for reward = entry cost x probability of victory + opportunity cost from time spent. And the rewards are balanced around the probablity of victory not being guaranteed. I also, on an emotional level when playing, feel that losing the entry cost is the biggest source of tension for dungeons and such. But if there were no reward at the end I wouldn't mind there being no entry cost. A system allowing you to freely explore dungeons / boss altars / LI / etc. for no rewards other than exploration and experimentation is absolutely something I would welcome. (Maybe even untradeable rewards)

Basically what I think you are saying is that you want:
- removal of soul points
- more respawn points over the world, specifically before bosses not inside dungeons. But also generally near places people are just more likely to die.
- optional free entry to dungeons / boss altars / LI / etc. (But either not gaining a reward when entering for free or only gaining untradeable rewards when entering for free)

If this is what you want I think we actually agree. If all three of the above points were general suggestions threads I would vote "yes" in each poll.

 

And that
is correct on every point.

I hadn't thought about the potential usefulness of walkbacks; that completely makes sense, and I agree.
Entry costs only make sense if there is a reward, and because the rewards to Legendary Island are untradable, I personally think that the entry cost should be removed entirely, or, at least, heavily reduced.

 

There are three parts if you're grinding it
a) Getting the materials to fight the boss
b) Fighting the boss.
c) Walking back to the boss altar because, for some reason, most boss altars spawn you further away from the altar than dying would

Honestly, my main issue with boss altars is that you have to walk several hundred blocks to get to the altar if you want to fight it multiple times,
and you probably will have to fight it multiple times because boss altars don't have guaranteed drops.
In my experience, it takes longer to get back to the boss than it takes to grind the materials and fight the boss combined.
This makes grinding boss altars incredibly tedious, as you have to do this every time you beat the boss

 

bump10char

 

Honestly I've never had a problem with soul points and they always top up overnight when I am offline. I don't mind the system but I am sure that it can be better. maybe a soul point merchant in all towns? Probably not a good idea but that was on the top of my head.

 

I'm not really arguing against your position here, you kind of almost say what I am saying, it's just that you bring up a pro-soul-points argument that many people give, which is the idea that this (as well as walkbacks, and other ways of making it harder to retry content) force people to think about strategy, or rethink their builds. The problem with this is that you can obviously still choose to take your time to think about strategy in a world without runbacks if you want, and you probably will if that's the right thing to do in the situation; but sometimes the best use of your time is just to retry the boss a few more times beacuse you think the strategy you have is a good one, just one you need to practice pulling off properly. Players will generally be better judges of what they themselves need than the game, and if you don't think players will know to think about strategy in this situation, you can always find less heavy-handed ways to encourage them, like just telling them to do so.

That's probably good. I think I've tried to keep up with the arguments here, but I haven't been paying too much attention, and I haven't seen that argued for yet and now I am genuinely curious if that's come up.

The issue is that the "probability of victory" totally varies depending on the player. I've attempted LI at least 30 times by now and I have never gotten any further than Robob. I've spent a pretty enormous amount of my emeralds on LI runs and have yet to get any rewards to make it back. I don't really mind at all that I'm not getting the rewards, but I am quite annoyed by the entrance fee because LI is the main source of enjoyment of the endgame for me, and I'd like to be able to do it more without having to grind other stuff for money beforehand.
You could easily solve this. What if, after dying, you respawned in some lobby inside of LI, and were allowed to retry from the start again for free, and if you kept dying you could keep retrying until you either finally won or left (in which case you forfeit your stuff, just like when you leave in the middle of LI right now). You would still have to start back at The Mummyboard every time (which is plenty of punishment enough), and if you decided to go leave you'd still have to pay money, and most importantly after winning and getting rewards you would have to pay again if you wanted to get another set of rewards by beating it again, but if you were really struggling you'd be allowed to practice the bosses without worrying about going bankrupt.
That kind of solution can easily be employed in lots of places where this might come up. You can absolutely prevent ridiculous inflation caused from better players (especially with mythics) obviously beating content more easily, without screwing over players who need practice with the game's mechanics, or who just want to have fun.

 

The point about tension in boss fights is one I'm totally on board with. I do think that the climactic tense feeling you get when fighting a boss is awesome, but my problem is just that the feeling I tend to get in this game is much closer to dread, dread that is so extreme it becomes unenjoyable. It's hard to get into the flow-state of fighting a boss with no tension, but it's also really hard to get into that state when -to use LI as an example- all you can think about is that fact that if you make a mistake you'll be foreced to pay half the emeralds in your small bank account, wait like half an hour for your soul points to regenerate, and then fight like 5 bosses to get back to the one you are in. The "tension" I get when I'm in the later stages of LI, especially around Mecho CoW which is based on a boss that really requires the player to focus on not freaking out, is so intense that it sometimes makes LI feel like it's not worth doing.

Also, every fight has a different amount of tension that will work best for it. The Eye has it's boss fight amplified to tremendous heights largely because of tension, meanwhile certain other bosses could really do with less. It's an aspect of the boss fight that contributes to the player's experience just like any other mechanic. Soul Points and other proposed punishment systems that cover the entire game, add the same amount of tension to every boss, when that's clearly not a good idea. I'd much rather if it was kept to a boss-by-boss basis, where tension can be easily increased or decreased by changing the length of the runback or the length of the boss fight and other things that are boss-specific.

 

you can assume everything I'm not quoting is something I either completely agree with or like.
Edit: wrote this before I quoted almost everything ;p overall I very much agree with you but you made some interesting points I liked writing about.

Actually, from my experience in game design (admittedly boardgames), many videos about video game design, and what I think I know about the psychology of humans, people are really bad at this. People (myself included) will absolutely throw themselves at a wall many times before trying to walk around it unless you force them to reconsider. Although technically correct that you do have the option from a game design standpoint it makes sense to force people to take this time.

However, like I said here

I would like to make this forced time off to be less (more spawn points to spawn closer to where you were and free entry to practice for dungeons/boss altars/LI).

Combining the two points above. I would be in favor of a "training mode" for LI with free entry and no real rewards.
However I do believe that people who have builds which are simply not ready for LI would absolutely try to keep brute-forcing LI. Especially if opting out would make them feel like they not only lose out on what they could get out of it but also the emeralds put in.
Yes, this still happens when it costs emeralds but it happens a lot less than it would otherwise.

I can definitely see how one could disagree with me on that. It goes pretty hard against the idea of player freedom and choice being what makes things fun, which is a widespread sentiment I find reasonable but disagree with.

Do you think you would use the "training mode" I described above for LI? And if so, do you think that after beating that mode you would no longer feel something so close to dread when playing against actual LI? (I feel like it's a solution to the problem but I also don't personally experience dread when fighting LI so I'd prefer to hear from you)

Great point! I'd like to extend it beyond bosses and also apply generally around the map.
but isn't this already implemented? Every boss/dungeon/place has it's own "unique" route back from the spawn point, entry fee to pay, etc. Soul points add a baseline that's the same and everything else comes on top as additional punishment. True that soul points aren't dynamic for increasing tension, but systems exist for creating different types of punishments in different scenarios where you die.

Do you (or anybody else) have ideas about different systems around death not currently implemented which can be used dynamically (and the risks of which are also understood by the player before they die)?


(and one final clarification)

Nobody made that literal argument. But the argument that there should be no punishment for death at all has been made. If you, like me, take "walking back to where you were" and "having to get the boss's health down to the point it was" and such as a punishment for death, the idea of there being no punishment for death essentially means death doesn't really do anything (or technically death could reward you but nobody is saying that should be a thing). This was the point I was arguing against. In my eyes, there should be a punishment for death. Preferably limited to just walking back a little, resetting health bars or bosses, and entrance fees for optional content such as dungeons/LI

 

The problem with Wynncraft is that there is no tension build up on the walk back. To fix this, the CT should make dying give a "reward multiplier" that only applies to the type of mob that killed you. This "reward multiplier" will build up the more times you die to that same type of mob, but will get reset if you die to anything that isn't said mob, or if you kill any mob that isn't the mob that killed you. If you kill the mob that killed you, then the multiplier gets consumed, and applied to the rewards that the mob dropped.
This also has the side bonus of making item and ingredient grinding much more interesting.

 

The issue, though, is that this sounds like something that would be heavily exploitable for grinding and make an obscene amount of money

 

(that was a joke btw)

 

some people in this thread are so ridiculous that what you said sounded more reasonable than some things they say